DigitalGlobe was offered $18M to keep its HQ in Longmont

Westminster offering slightly less than one-third of that

The future home of DigitalGlobe's corporate headquarters in Westminster at 1300 W. 120 Ave., just west of Interstate 25.
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Picasa
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LONGMONT -- The city of Longmont put together an $18 million incentive package in pursuit of DigitalGlobe keeping its corporate headquarters here, nearly three times what the city of Westminster is granting the company to relocate there.

According to documents obtained by the Times-Call on Friday, Mayor Dennis Coombs outlined the incentive package in a letter to DigitalGlobe president and CEO Jeffrey Tarr dated July 3.

"On behalf of the Longmont City Council, this letter serves as our united pledge to work with DigitalGlobe to ensure your growth and success in Longmont and around the world well into the future," the letter read.

DigitalGlobe's Longmont headquarters. The company announced Wednesday that it has chosen Westminster, not Broomfield, for its new corporate headquarters. (Times-Call file photo)
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It promised $18 million in "direct financial assistance and cost savings to your company over a 10-year period, including operational savings that no other Front Range city can provide."

"I think any time a community has the opportunity to either recruit a company or help a company expand into a potentially 400,000-square-foot facility, and add what could be up to 1,000 jobs to your workforce, it's an extraordinary opportunity, and the city viewed this as a time to pull out all the stops," assistant city manager Shawn Lewis said Friday. Lewis was involved in putting the incentive package together.

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DigitalGlobe had appeared before the Colorado Economic Development Commission in June seeking incentives in order to keep its corporate headquarters in Colorado. That was only months after the acquisition of its former biggest rival, GeoEye, was completed. GeoEye had a presence in Northglenn but its headquarters were in Herndon, Va.

At the time, DigitalGlobe told the state's ECD that it would be building a new corporate headquarters and adding up to 505 jobs over the next five years, and it was considering Broomfield and Westminster as places to do that. The company told the commission at the time that one city it did not name had offered a package worth $8 million to lure the company, and Longmont looked at that amount as the "number to beat," Lewis said.

The July 3 letter from the city to DigitalGlobe was followed two weeks later with a face-to-face meeting with Coombs, Councilman Brian Bagley, City Manager Harold Dominguez and DigitalGlobe executives and representatives from their site-selection company, Cresa.

In that meeting, Longmont representatives discussed the incentive package and highlighted several reasons why the company should stay in Longmont, including the city's electrical rates, which are about 35 percent cheaper than most metro Denver cities; the educated work force; the stability of the city's water supply as compared with other Front Range cities; the city's own fiber-optic loop, which can provide cheaper high-speed connectivity than available from private companies; the city's development approval process, which it guaranteed to fast-track for DigitalGlobe; and the air, rail and road transportation services Longmont businesses have access to.

"The bulk of the incentive package that we were offering would have been future revenue that we would forego over a 10-year period," Lewis said Friday.

What is not clear from the newly released documents are what portion of Longmont's proposed incentives were direct financial assistance, such as the waiving of permit fees, and what percentage would have been operational savings for the company over the course of the decade. That information was redacted from the documents because the city would prefer not to tip its hand to other communities it may have to compete with in the future in recruiting and retaining companies, Lewis said.

He said Longmont officials were notified about 30 minutes before the public announcement DigitalGlobe made Aug. 29 of the company's decision that it had chosen Broomfield for its new corporate headquarters.

Much to that city's chagrin, however, DigitalGlobe announced in October that instead of building a new campus in Broomfield it would be occupying an existing 482,000-square-foot building at 1300 W. 120th St. in Westminster. In intends to relocate most of its employees there in mid-2015, although the company did extend the lease on its Longmont facility recently for another five years. It has said it will continue to have a Longmont presence past 2015, although it said it is still working out the details of what that will look like.

Lewis said that the company's actions in the past few months indicate to him that "ultimately, incentives were not the deciding factor in this relocation."

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